Fedora BugZappers relaunch

Building on the recent success of the recent "gcc43 rebuild triage effort", we are pleased to announce the official re-launch of the Fedora Bug Triage Process!

Are you frustrated, because you would like to help to Fedora community, but you couldn't write a line of code if your life depended on it? You don't feel qualified to help with the Art project, and you can't translate documentation?

Do not despair. Anyone can be a bug triager. No special education or background is required in order to triage bugs. You do not even have to know anything about programming!

Bug triagers are the first line of defense for Fedora developers. We strive to make it easy for developers to focus on bugs that are worth their precious time (so that hopefully they will have more time for resolving your bugs :-)). We do this by performing simple tasks like requesting additional information to clarify reported problems and verify that the bug is filed correctly, and verifying the bug is not a duplicate of one already filed.

Have you ever reported a bug, but been frustrated because no one responded to it? Have you ever been annoyed by having your bug closed without ever receiving a single reply?

Are you looking for a meaningful way to contribute to Fedora that does not require you to be a developer or package maintainer? Do you have a genuine desire to help people? Do you want to learn more about a particular component within Fedora?

If so, then the triage team is for you!

There are two ways to get started. If you already feel comfortable triaging bugs you can start today by following the instructions at: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/GettingStarted

If you'd prefer a little training first, we are in the process of arranging some online training sessions and are waiting for people to specify the time that works best for them. We are planning to conduct sessions at various times that work for people. If you are already a Fedora contributor with wiki edit access, add your name to http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/Training.

If you are do not yet have wiki edit access, here are four different ways to make contact with us:

1) Create a wiki account by following the instructions here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/WikiEditing#Getting_Edit_Access and add your name to the wiki.
2) Subscribe to fedora-test-list@redhat.com at https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-test-list and mention on the list that you are interested in attending a triage training session along with a preferred day and time.
3) Stop by #fedora-qa IRC channel on the Freenode server (irc.freenode.net). Someone is usually around that will be glad to help you get set up.
4) Come to our weekly IRC meeting on #fedora-meeting. Our current meeting schedule is here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/Meetings

To show an example of what Fedora bug triagers do consider a recent project when we made a noticeable impact by triaging bugs for the mass-rebuild of packages using GCC 4.3. Not sure what GCC is? No problem. Suffice it to say that the entire collection of packages compiled with GCC (the C compiler used in Fedora) had to be rebuilt for a new version coming out in Fedora 9. Five hundred forty two individual source packages failed to rebuild automatically for one reason or another. The triage team reduced this to approximately 160 source packages that were true "failure to compile" errors. The other packages had different problems that were unrelated to the compiler. This first sweep by the triage team helped save release engineering and the package maintainers time, by seeing that the bugs got put in the right place.

There are lots of opportunities to make a noticeable difference as a bug triager. Come join us!

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About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Jon Stanley published on March 11, 2008 4:14 PM.